I’d like to tell you that I learned most of this stuff when I was getting a masters in publishing, but unfortunately that information remains outdated and useless. Here’s a random sampling of things I picked up in the few years I’ve been doing this author thing.
Romance novels generate about $1.44 BILLION in revenue each year, earning more than every other fiction genre. Which is why romance authors and readers get cranky when book snobs don’t take it seriously.
Genre romance conventions require two elements:
- The romantic plot is the central storyline of the book
- It ends in a Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happily For Now (HFN)
But Ariella, all of Nicholas Sparks’ books are so sad at the end!
Right. Because his books (and books like his) aren’t genre Romance. Sparks writes literary fiction with romantic subplots aka love stories. While romance is important to the story, it’s not the story. His website has a pretty good explainer of the difference between the two.
Any novel can have a romance subplot. To be considered genre Romance it needs to follow the two genre conventions above.
Open door vs closed door/fade to black
Open door: on-page descriptions of sexual activity. Descriptions can vary from tame to very explicit
Closed door or fade to black: no on-page descriptions of sexual activity
These terms, among others, are alternatives to using “clean” and “dirty” which originated with purity culture and imply that books without sex are morally superior.
Spice: A social media term for sexual activity in a piece of media.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram will suppress content that discusses sex, regardless of the context. Spice is a workaround that has been widely adopted in bookish spaces.
The Big 5 publishers are Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan. Imprints are subsidiaries of The Big 5.
Traditional publishing or trad pub is when an author seeks a publishing path that includes signing with a literary agent who will sell the book to one of the Big 5 publishers or their imprints.
Big 5 publishers (and often their imprints) will only consider manuscript submissions brought to them by an agent.
Advances and royalties are a complex topic, but generally speaking, larger publishers will pay the author a set amount as an advance. Authors need to “earn out” their advance through sales before they can collect royalties. Authors are not required to pay back any part of their advance if they don’t earn out.
Agents work for authors and are paid on commission, which comes out of advances and royalties. Standard commission is currently 15 percent.
Publishing houses take on the costs of production and also the risks. Self-published (indie) authors take on the full cost of production and the financial risks, but have more creative control of their book.
In the US, authors do get paid when a library purchases print books and digital licenses for their collection, but unlike in some other countries, authors don’t get paid every time a book is borrowed.
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) pays authors per-page-read.
Example: If you read the first five pages of LET IT RAIN when it hits Kindle Unlimited in April and decide it’s hot garbage, I’ll still get paid for those five pages you read, regardless if you finish the book.
But, let’s say you want to support me anyway, and you just click through the pages real quick without reading it. Amazon knows what you did and those pages won’t count. If it happens often enough, Amazon will penalize the author.
Now, let’s say you think LET IT RAIN is an absolute masterpiece and you read it every night for a month. The KU page reads only count the first time the book is read. If you want to support the author it’s best to purchase your own copy.
There’s so much more but I’m going to let you digest all that for a bit. Was any of that new information? Does it change the way you think about romance books and the publishing industry?
Leave your romance or publishing questions in the comments and I’ll include them in a future post.
